Play golf with an augmented caddy (you still need to carry the cart yourself).

Augmented reality t-shirts are cool. Star Wars is cool (as determined by a poll of 500 AR fands). Thus, augmented reality t-shirts, featuring Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker fighting each other must be the epitome of coolness. I don’t have a clue who made those or where can you get them, but you may enjoy the video:

No doubt about it, this week was under the sign of Kinect. Dozens of amateur programers used the OpenKinect drivers to create wonderful, many times AR related, demos. These and more in this week’s linkfest:

Kinect hacking is nice, but the biggest news of the week is coming from Layar which raised another $14M. Follow the link to read a letter from Layar’s CEO Raimo van der Klein, on what it means and what’s next for Layar.

And here’s yet another video showing the power of Kinect. Created by Theo Watson in a single day, this is a very impressive skeleton tracker. How long will we have to wait till someone finds a way to combile AR glasses with Kinect?

LightSpace from Microsoft Research – augmenting a room with projectors and 3d cameras. As I’ve said earlier, it’s amazing how a technology that would have looked like magic just four years ago, is quite banal these days.

Today’s video is coming to us straight from ISMAR 2010. It’s a presentation of the results achieved in the paper “Build Your World and Play In It: Interacting with Surface Particles on Complex Objects” by Brett Jones and other researchers from the University of Illinois. The paper presents a way to map virtual content on 3d physical constructions and “play” with them. For more details check out Jones’ website. I think that Angry Birds would be prefect on such a platform:

Have a great week, and the lucky of you who get to be in ISMAR, take some videos, please!

This week’s video comes to us from Youtube user bittman25, or as his friends call him Danny. The clip is called “If Minority Report Was Our Twisted Reality”. It’s not a masterpiece, but has a nice twist at the end:

I was going to expand on my predictions that Rouli had posted on Games Alfresco because, frankly, they were pretty lame (mine and not the other nine, those were good.) But decided that there have been enough predictions for 2010. So instead, I want to go over the things I want to happen in 2010 in regards to augmented reality.

1. I want the Nexus One phone from Google to be untethered, cheap and make AR apps fun.

2. I want to be surprised by an AR ready HMD.

3. I want to see fun, creative AR games that are across all platforms and come at an affordable price.

4. I want the AR inspection assist project I’m working on with Metaio to go flawlessly and for it to revolutionize the way we do difficult inspection job at Toyota and make it easier on our team members.

5. I want Google Goggles to be a database that other programs can use for pattern recognition and markerless tracking.

6. I want to attend ISMAR10 even though its all the way over in South Korea.

7. I want the ISMAR09 presentations to be put up on YouTube so we can see all the great things that happened.

8. I want Apple to free their live video API for better AR on the iPhone.

9. I want to know what Neogence Enterprises has been working on all these years.

10. I want to continue to make Games Alfresco the hands-down, defacto source for all your augmented reality news.

So for all you programmers and entrepreneurs working on the latest in augmented reality tech, even though I may put up your YouTube video or link to your webpage and make semi-snarky comments about its usefulness or how its so-2009, I certainly appreciate your hard work. Unless you were just mailing it in hoping to capitalize on the AR buzz, then you deserve it and then some. For all of you in the former category, I leave you with my two favorite quotes to keep you going when things get tough:

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is no in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.

— Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

IT IS NOT THE CRITIC WHO COUNTS: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again…who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

This week’s video is of Ogmento’s Brian Selzer evangelistic talk at the Humanity+ conference “Reinventing Reality with AR” . Though most of his examples should be familiar to this blog’s patrons, he is a really good talker, and I’ve enjoyed the whole 15 minutes of his presentation (via GigantiCo):

[Games Alfresco readers, go to Gigantico to see the clip if it doesn’t work for you]